Universities are smart to step away from thorny political issues 

Recently, the presidents of several colleges and universities said something quite brilliant — namely, that they would stop saying so many things.  

For example, my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has issued a statement forswearing the issuing of statements about political and social issues that do not directly concern universities themselves.   

According to Penn’s interim president, Larry Jameson, “quieting Penn’s institutional voice” will allow for faculty and students to express their own individual opinions without the university weighing in on one side or the other of every controversial issue. Per Jameson, Penn “hope[s] to amplify the expertise and voices within.”  

In other words, students, faculty and staff are free to disagree with one another without fear of contradicting the institution.  

Bravo: A smart and honest stand, taken at an opportune moment.  

In practice, this means that those within a university community who disagree with the predominantly leftist views to which most faculty, staff and students subscribe may now argue with their classmates and colleagues without being preemptively declared in the wrong by the institution itself.

Does this mean that any significant number of those with cultural influence in higher education will now support the pursuit of truth rather than affirm whatever the universities’ most radical leftist inhabitants deem most virtuous at a given moment? Of course not. Does it follow that education will supersede activism as higher education’s most palpable source of energy? That would be wishful thinking.  

Nevertheless, for colleges and universities, this refusal to issue constant statements is an important step toward pluralism — and away from obsolescence.  

Higher education is facing a public relations crisis. First, there were the self-parodying displays of pro-Hamas “protest” by would-be activists on hunger strikes that lasted approximately the length of a fad diet, sporting oxymoronic signs like “queers for Palestine” (which would be darkly comical, if only it were meant to be a joke).  

Then there were the disastrous congressional hearings in which elite college presidents’ answers on antisemitism and free speech failed to measure up to common sense, let alone to their institutions’ reputations.  

And as a backdrop to it all, there was “statement fatigue.” Since 2014 or so, when social media in its present form swallowed all the old ways of arguing and mourning and interpreting and grieving, every new crisis has inspired new statements.  

Because the powers that be in higher education range almost exclusively from the center-left to the far left, these statements were quite one-sided. But the issues that inspired those statements often were not. And now, having watched universities’ credibility crumble in real time, many Americans are willing to acknowledge as much.  

While attempting to shield themselves from this reality, colleges and universities will by extension improve our national discourse, and maybe even our national character.  

On today’s mainstream left, it is all too common to find otherwise lovely and intelligent people who think that everyone who does not accept their worldview is patently and unequivocally wrong about everything. The “normie” left tolerates no dissent from its orthodoxies around race, gender and progress. Try to voice disagreement and you’ll be politely but firmly frozen out.  

When did the typical nonprofit middle-manager decide that people who don’t agree with her perspective are, if not deplorable, obviously misinformed and impossible to dialogue with? During college, most likely.  

This is partly through the one-sided reading that her ideologically monolithic professors assigned. It is partly through the student life presentations that her university required her to sit through. But mostly, it is down to the political tenor of campuses where ill-informed dogma was mistaken for intellectual rigor, because dissent was essentially eliminated by fiat.  

No longer, and not a moment too soon.  

Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture.